


So Glad We've Almost Made It

by heavvymetalqueen



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Dissociation, M/M, MGS4, alternate endings?, perhaps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 03:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10528023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavvymetalqueen/pseuds/heavvymetalqueen
Summary: Ocelot feels as if he hasn’t been warm since 1985.





	

Ocelot is tired.

He has never been more tired in a long, exhausting life, and he barely got to live the last few years of it.

As Liquid Ocelot leaks out of him along with entirely too much of his blood and some transmission fluid from his arm, Ocelot resurfaces in a body that is over a decade older than it was when he wore it last, wrecked with nanomachines and bionic additions and more drugs than humans should take in a lifetime.

His empire of lies crumbles into the ocean under him, and as everybody is turned, Ocelot uses the last of his energy, the very last of the electrical inputs still going off in his muscles to drag himself to a lifeboat.

Two of his men, old Outer Heaven combat unit he trained from before they could grow a beard, help him into it then quietly row away from the commotion, starting the engine when the Missouri is out of sight.

Ocelot accepts the water and the IV offered to him, and gratefully passes out on the floor of the raft, the sloshing water lulling him in an achingly nostalgic way.

He’s dropped off at a private Alaskan pier far enough he will slink away unnoticed. By the time they realize there is no body to be recovered, Ocelot will have disappeared.

As he always does. Being in the foreground was never for him, and he is glad to return to the shadows.

“You’re free,” he tells the men. “Do with the rest of your lives what you feel is best.”

They salute anyway. Ocelot laughs.

It hurts to laugh.

It hurts to do anything.

It’s weird to walk without the rhythmic jangle of spurs to accompany his steps. He can’t wait to have his spurs again, his revolvers strapped to his side. Be himself again, for as much as that exists anymore, or has ever existed.

He can’t wait to see him again.

Ocelot smiles, and that hurts as well.

A few hours, a pack of disposable razors and a trip to a near empty Alaskan department store, and Ocelot has disappeared. No more moustache, hair cropped almost as short as when he was young, drab off-size clothes. The bandages and bruises do the rest. Nobody even glances at him as he boards a flight to Anchorage, and nobody cares about his pretty obviously fake documents as he buys tickets to Okinawa. Just another war veteran returning from the endless battlefield, dazed and confused by the system dropping around his ears. The only looks he gets on the dingy that takes fishermen and a couple hollow-eyed disconnected soldiers around the Yaeyama Archipelago are because he’s very obviously white and sticks out like a sore thumb.

The turquoise sea lapping at his bare calves as he steps off the dingy and onto the Taketomi island shore is as warm as soup.

Ocelot feels as if he hasn’t been warm since 1985.

A man is standing with the small group of people waiting on the white sand, towering over all of them, blond hair streaked with white shining like gold in the tropical sun, aviators more expensive than some of the houses on the island reflecting the blue, blue sky.

He raises his only arm to greet him.

Ocelot raises his own single arm. His prosthetic is at the bottom of the Bering sea, and he does not need it here, not with him. He has not seen him in nine years, an ironically long time, and it’s clear that in the meantime Miller has gone native. As they thought he would when they faked his death years ago. His mixed features are not particularly eye-catching in this part of Japan thanks to the western influence and his rugged good looks are a hit with all the small Japanese grandmothers. He looks happy.

“Ocelot,” says Miller.

“Kaz,” says Ocelot.

Ocelot does not have a bag. He owns nothing but the clothes on his back right now. Kaz roughly pats his empty shoulder and nods to the line of mopeds and the couple of donkeys by the dusty roadside. He owns an actual, honest to god rickshaw, an old Ape Piaggio as old and battered as they both are, with chipped blue paint and an embarrassing amount of stickers, fishing nets and groceries scattered in the rusty bed.

Ocelot sits in the musty passenger seat, and relaxes for the first time in two decades.

“Everything done?” says Kaz once the loud rattling engine covers most of their words.

“Yes. A devastating defeat. The world is finally free of my rule.”

“About time.”

It’s not over yet, not quite, but Ocelot has complete faith in the last loose end tying itself up.

Convincing George he truly is John when he wakes up in a few hours was child’s play compared to the amount of work he’d put into Venom back in the day. All he had to trick was a vegetable of a man, and the son that hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.

And George himself, but Ocelot hadn’t spent the best years of his life stuck to that particularly bitter ball and chain not to have him incredibly easy to influence with just a few words and a selection of simple triggers. FOXDIE will do the rest.

And then the Patriots will be finally over. The monster he created with the bones of the monster that raised him will be gone for good. Their meme erased. Genetic, and historical dead end, just like him.

Of course, the original plan had involved him dying at the hand of Solid Snake. But after seventy years of dedication to the mission, he’d allowed himself one, just _one_ selfish death wish.

He glances over to Kaz, driving with ease with his one hand. Alright, maybe two selfish wishes.

Kaz lives outside of the small village, behind a dry-stack stone wall and the greenest, lushest vegetation Ocelot has seen in years, brilliant and fragrant as they drive through it on a barely beaten path. Wooden house with open panels, white sand, impossibly blue sea, like a postcard. A tortoiseshell cat is lazily lounging on the wooden porch, washing a paw. She has a little bell on a red ribbon around her neck and regards Ocelot with one single green-eyed glance before resuming her grooming.

“Didn’t peg you for a cat person.”

“You of all people should have.”

The breeze from the sea is warm. The back of Kaz’s hand brushing his cheek is warmer.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

“Just tired,” says Ocelot. “For a dead man, I’m doing remarkably well.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Ocelot smiles, his whole body slow and warm.

Kaz kisses him. He tastes like sun, and salt. The Pacific on Kaz’s lips tastes different than the Indian Ocean used to, but his mouth tastes the same underneath.

“I missed you,” breathes Kaz on his lips.

“You’re the only one who ever has,” admits Ocelot, and yawns, undoubtedly ruining the mood. “That’s why I’m here and not at the bottom of the ocean.”

Kaz kisses his temple. “You’re starting to babble. When’s the last time you slept?”

“’85?”

“Bed. Now.”

He’s lying on futon a few minutes later, allowing himself to feel the crispness of the linen with every inch a naked body that still feels alien and wrong. Then Kaz lies next to him, impossibly warm against his back, tangling their fingers together, and Ocelot falls asleep, finally.

He sleeps for over thirty hours. When he wakes, groggy and disoriented, Kaz is gone but the cat is tucked between his thigh and his stomach, and purrs happily when he scratches her chin.

“What’s her name?” he asks, padding into the kitchen. Her tiny bell as she follows him, tail up and straight, makes up for the lack of spurs.

“Shizuka,” says Kaz, who is cooking something that smells delicious.

Ocelot sits at the table, and Shizuka draws slow eights around his ankles. “Doesn’t that mean Quiet?”

“Peace and Quiet,” chuckles Kaz. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m sure it has nothing to do with somebody else named Quiet.”

Kaz places a bowl of fried rice in front of him. “She showed up one day acting like she owned the place. I couldn’t call her Ocelot, so I went with the next in the line of thorns in my side.”

The rice is delicious. Shizuka enjoys the morsels of fish Ocelot slips her under the table. Kaz runs rough fingertips in his short hair.

Is this what being free is like? Every day like the previous and the next, no hurry, no mission, no planning. Sleeping, eating, talking, kissing, pushing their aging bodies a little bit to be intimate sometimes, other times falling asleep breathing each other’s breath with the cat purring between them. Ocelot expects boredom, emptiness, but the sky is so wide and the sea so warm and Kaz so beautiful standing on his raft between the two. Ocelot plays with the cat. Swims every morning. Reads old novels. Refreshes his Japanese. Learns to cook, a little. Kaz chats with him, teaches him how to make rice and clean fish, talks to shopkeepers, puts his arm around his waist when they go for watered down beers in town on Saturdays. The sun shines, and when it doesn’t, they stay inside and watch the world go on without them on Kaz’s old cathode TV.

Ocelot’s mind isn’t what it used to be. He forgets things. Rambles sometimes. Drops objects. Speaks to Kaz in languages he won’t understand. Some nights vivid nightmares of melting flesh startle him awake, and he struggles with Kaz as he tries to calm him down. Some days he sits on the porch for hours, dissociating quietly with the cat in his lap. Sometimes he'll suddenly be scared, or in pain, sometimes manic and elated as if he’s just jumped off the MIG in Rokovoj Bereg.

Kaz never mentions it when Ocelot accidentally calls him John, or George, or Eva. Sits by him as he rambles in Russian, holds him when he panics.

Some days his fingers tangled in Ocelot’s melt away in the humidity of Rassvet, electricity making his hair stand on end. Some other days the warm tatami becomes the hot tarmac of motherbase, and Shizuka’s bell the cheerful chime of his spurs.

Sometimes the curtain of rain takes him to the slowly undulating curtains of a hospital room, the smell of disinfectant as strong and real as the deep knowledge an awakening is becoming more and more unlikely, and also the blossoming realization he does not, in fact, want it to happen anymore.

Sometimes he’s back in Shadow Moses, the cold biting and nostalgic, Mantis rustling Russian his only company. Other times he’s Liquid himself, scared, and hurt, and alone with his rage.

Today Ocelot is lying on cold metal, bleeding out while John looks at him with pity through his son’s eyes. It’s so real; the pain, the sweat freezing on his bare chest, the cold sun above them.

“You’re pretty good,” he croaks, and David closes his eyes, and Ocelot dies.

It’s all right, he thinks as he unravels peacefully. Even if this is reality, he accomplished his mission.

And Kaz will be waiting on the other side, one way or another.

 

 


End file.
